IBM's Ed Walsh, Director of Storage Efficiency sits down with Steve Duplessie, Founder of ESG to talk about how IBM Real-time Compression sets the bar for doing storage optimization in NAS. At the end of the day, if you can do compression in real time,...

IBM offers three types of cloud solutions, for storage and
other services: Smart Business on the IBM Cloud, Smart Business Cloud
services, and Smart Business Systems. − Smart Business on the IBM Cloud are standardized services provided by IBM on a...

Summary: Virtualization is a modern approach for enhancing a system's ability for sharing system resources to ensure provisioning can readily meet business requirements. Agile development helps us ascertain stakeholder inputs with changing business and...

There seems to be a perception in the storage arena that IT Security is for all facets other than storage. However, if you have been monitoring the SAN product announcements in the storage space (which I know you are) you have seen the end-to-end security...

Mastering the art of stretching out a week-long event into two weeks' worth of blog posts, I continue my
coverage of the [ Data Center 2010 conference ], Tuesday afternoon I attended several sessions that focused on technologies for Cloud Computing.
(...

Give bootinfo the boot If you want to get the size of a disk (virtual or physical), you can use the AIX getconf command . getconf
DISK_SIZE /dev/hdisk0 140013 The size is reported in MB, so the disk above is a 140 GB disk. You could use the bootinfo -s, but...

SERVING UP LVs, PVs and PAVs Since we've got redundant arrays on SANs these days, it may seem almost quaint to speak about software mirroring using the AIX Logical Volume Manager. Even so, LVM is very useful when you want to move data around. If you need to...

The following article is not new. I published it 1,5 years in an internal IBM blog. So why publish it again externally then? From my problem cases of the recent months I found that the principle described there is very common and it most probably won't change...

The SAN Volume Controller ( SVC) has truly come of age in 2010. With release 6.1 we not only combine it with the very mature RAID adapters of
the DS8000 to produce the Storwize
V7000 , but we continue to develop the SVC as the world’s leading...

There are lots of good reasons for having spare disk for rootvg, as I
looked at in the post make
way for rootvg . With virtual disks you can resize your volume group
on the fly: Increase rootvg
dynamically If your rootvg “disk” is actually virtual,...

"Go live or go home" If you need to get a lot of data from one AIX host to another, there's
more than one way to do it quickly. During a migration to a new system, you may do a database dump or archive and want to get the data available to the new...

So something I truly hate to see when visiting computer rooms is fibre cables hanging in the breeze with no dust covers, their precious glass connectors exposed to the world. Even worse are fibre patch panels and HBAs without dust covers. . When new equipment...

Its a given today that SAN implementations have redundancy by design. When we sell SAN switches we always urge clients to use dual fabrics. Its accepted industry best practice. By having hosts with dual HBAs, each host can attach to both fabrics and survive...

I wrote up this blog entry and then deleted the whole entry while editing a typo. It seems to be a glitch in the developerworks Blog interface, but it could also be a code 16 (problem lies 16 inches in front of keyboard). Anyway.... Cisco have filled a...

This week I'm pleased to bring you a look into the mind of one of IBM's Master Inventors, Barry Whyte, who's been driving innovation in the area of Storage and shares his insights in a blog on My developerWorks. Connect with Barry: Barry Whyte's profile on My...

Well, it's Tuesday again, and that means IBM announcements! Today we had a major launch, with so many products, services and offerings
that I can't fit them all into a single post, so I will split them up into several posts to give the attention they...

Continuing my coverage of the Data Center Conference, held Dec 1-4 in Las Vegas, an analyst presented the challenges of managing the rapid growth in storage capacity. Administrators ability to manage storage is not keeping up with the growth. His...

The "Storage Symposium Mexico - 2008" conference was a great success this week! Day 1 - The plan was for me to arrive for the Wednesday night reception. Each attendee was given a copy of my latest book[ Inside System Storage: Volume I ] and I was...

Yesterday, I asked if you were prepared for the future? The future is now. Today, IBM announced its[ "New Enterprise Data Center" ] vision and strategy which spans software, hardware and services in dealing withthe latest challenges that our clients are...

Yesterday, I promised I would cover other products from the Feb 12 announcement. Today I will focus on the IBM SAN768B director. Some people are confused on the differences between switchesand directors. I find there are three key differences: Directors are...

Many people have asked me if there was any logic with the IBM naming convention of IBM Systems branded servers. Here's your quick and easy cheat sheet: System x -- "x" for cross-platform architecture. Technologies from our mainframe and UNIX servers were...

Yesterday's announcement that IBM had acquired XIV to offer storage for Web 2.0 applicationsprompted a lot of discussion in both the media and the blogosphere. Several indicated thatit was about time that one of the major vendors stepped forward to provide...

It's official! My "blook" Inside System Storage - Volume I is now available. This blog-based book, or “blook”, comprises the first twelve months of posts from this Inside System Storage blog,165 posts in all, from September 1, 2006 to August 31, 2007. ...

I am in Toronto, Canada. It is a lot cold and rainy here, worse than last week in Seoul, Korea.This looks like a slow news week, so slow that the only news here in Canada is the possibility of anew 5-dollar coin. I thought I would make this week's theme...

Well, we had another successful event in Second Life today. Unlike our April 26 launch of our System Storage products for IBM Business Partners only, this time we decided this time to make it as a "Meet the Storage Experts" Q&A Panel format, and open up...

This Doonesbury cartoonabout Second Life reminded me about our September 20 event. Registration for the "Meet the Storage Experts" event in Second Life will close this week fornext week's September 20 event. All IBMers, clients and IBM Business Partners are...

The proof-of-concept that IBM Haifa research center developed back in 1998 became what we now call the iSCSI protocol.The book iSCSI: The Universal Storage Connection introduces the history as follows: In the fall of 1999 IBM and Cisco met to discuss the...

Registration is now open for our next "Meet the Storage Experts" event in Second Life. All IBMers, clients and IBM Business Partners are welcome to attend. We will focus this time on DS3000 and N series disk systems, tape systems,and IBM storage networking...

I am back at "the Office" for a single day today. This happens often enough I need a name for it.Air Force pilots that practice landing and take-offs call them "Touch and Go", but I think I needsomething better. If you can think of a better phrase, let me...

Stephen2615 over at RupturedMonkey asks Do more SAN related issues happen with blade enclosures? and shares some of his bad experiences related to HP Blades in B class enclosures. Others comment that they had similar experiences with their B class equipment....

I'm in the Malev lounge at the Budapest Airport, waiting for my flight to return back to Tucson. My buddy Marc Farley from EqualLogic points to a great InfoStorarticle by Ann Silverthorn titled The benefits of SANs for SMBs . Back in the late 1980's and early...

Well, I'm going to take a two week break from blogging. Not because my clarification of storage terminology got me Marc Farley's finger wagging of shame . No, I'm going on vacation.I'll be going to a third-world country, possibly outside the reaches of cell...

IBM had some big announcements today. The theme for today's announcement was "Protected Information", as there are many reasons to protect your most strategic asset, your information. Let's do a quick run-down of a few of them. IBM LTO generation 4 LTO 4...

I survived my first day at SNW Spring 2007 .This is my first time at SNW, but it is very much like many of the other conferences I have been to.It officially started Monday morning with pre-conferencetutorials and primer break-outsessions that covered storage...

Well, this week I am in Maryland, just outside of Washington DC. It's a bit cold here. Robin Harris over at StorageMojo put out this Open Letter to Seagate, Hitachi GST, EMC, HP, NetApp, IBM and Sun about the results of two academic papers, one from Google,...

I am still wiping the coffee off my computer screen, inadvertently sprayed when I took a sip while reading HDS' uber-blogger Hu Yoshida's post on storage virtualization andvendor lock-in . This blog appears to be the text version of their funny video . While...

In case you haven't noticed, IBM System Storage makes most of their announcements on Tuesdays. IBM announced a lot today, so here is a quick run-down. Cisco storage networking products IBM continues to resell Cisco switches and directors, but now can offer...

Continuing on my theme of storage area networking, today I thought I would coverthe concept of convergence. This is the notion of disparate things that come together. Convergence plays a big role in Apple's new iPhone . ExpatJane has a nice collection of news...

Continuing on my theme of storage area networking, today I thought I would coverstorage networking at home. Before the PC, corporate end-users had dumb terminals (displays) connected to mainframes (servers) thatwere then connected to external disk and tape...

Continuing this week's theme on Storage Area Networks, today I thought I would talkabout the various terms we use for our equipment. One area of confusion are the adjectives "entry-level", "midrange" and "enterprise-class".What do these mean? Well, as in the...

Last week, Paul Weinberg of eChannelLine.com asks Is this the year of the SAN (again)? So, I thought this week I would cover my thoughts and opinions on storage networking. We oftenfocus on servers or storage devices, and forget that the network in between is...

Continuing this week's theme of New Year's Resolutions for the data center, today we'll talk about one that people don't always think about on a personal level, that is to hone your tools and skills. A long time ago, I used to be a regular speaker at the SHARE...

Happy New Year! This year I resolve to be more consistent in my blogging, and my goal is to give you one to five entries per week, every week, based on the advice from Glenn Wolsey , Jennette Banks , and others.On some weeks, I will have a running theme, so...

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, yesterday was this year's Winter Solstice , representingthe shortest amount of daylight between sunrise and sunset. So today, I thought I would blog on my thoughtsof managing scarcity. Earlier in my career, I had...

On SearchStorage.com, my buddy Tony Asaro recaps the latest Storage Acquisition Frenzy . It has always been the case in fast pace technology areas that you can't tell the players without a program card, andthis is especially true for storage. When analyzing...

A few years ago, I was the IBM portfolio manager for storage connected to BladeCenter solutions. I learned a lot about the BladeCenter design, and got to speak at various x86 server events. My colleague John put together a nice webpage on storage for System x...

Yesterday (September 7, 2006) the Eclipse Foundation announced that it has approved the creation of the Aperi Storage Management Framework Project. There's been a lot of confusion out there about Aperi, so I thought I would post some facts and opinions about...

Dave Hitz from Network Appliance has a wonderful discussion of "branding": What do Marketing People Mean When They Say Brand? A lot of people ask me about IBM branding, as we have recently changed brands. In the past we had two separate brands, one for...

Wow! I've only had this blog since Sep. 1, and already it is listed in the Data Storage Bloggers wiki list. In last week's System Storage Portfolio Top Gun class in Dallas, some of the students were not familiarwith Really Simple Syndication (RSS). For the...

An interesting blog in "Channel Advisor" relates to the lack of trust in the storage industry: Education — Trust: Key To Survival In Today's IT World and offers some advice to vendors and channel distributions. I can't stress enough how important is...

This week I was in Dallas, Texas, teaching at the "System Storage Portfolio Top Gun" class. Can you believe it was hotter and more humid in Dallas than in Tucson? I am glad to be home. For those unfamiliar with Top Gun classes, it is our top level sales...

It's official! On August 8, Brocade announced its intent to acquire McData corporation. IBM will continue to sell both Brocade and McData networking gear, as the acquisition will not be finalized until January 2007. Read more about it directly from brocade...

I have created blog categories, based on our System Storage offering matrix, which you can track individually: Disk Disk systems, including the IBM System Storage DS Family of products, SAN Volume Controller, N series, as well as features unique to these...